No Descendants Are Left from the First Eskimos

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Ancient human DNA is shedding light on the peopling of the Arctic
region of the Americas, revealing that the first people there did
not leave any genetic descendants in the New World, unlike
previously thought.

In the largest study yet of ancient human DNA, the researchers
suggest the first group of people in the New World Arctic may
have lived in near-isolation for more than 4,000 years because of
a mindset that eschewed adopting new ideas. It remains a mystery
why they ultimately died off, they added.

The first people in the Arctic of the Americas may have arrived
about 6,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia.
The area was the last region of the New World that humans
populated due to its
harsh and frigid nature.

But the details of how the New World Arctic
was peopled remain a mystery because the region's vast size and
remoteness make it difficult to conduct research there. For
example, it was unclear whether the Inuit people living there
today and the cultures that preceded them were genetically the
same people, or independent groups.

The scientists analyzed DNA from bone, teeth and hair samples
collected from the remains of 169 ancient humans from Arctic
Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. They also sequenced the
complete genomes of seven modern-day people from the region for
comparison.

The early Paleo-Eskimo people include the Pre-Dorset and Saqqaq
cultures, who mostly hunted reindeer and musk ox. When a
particularly cold period began about 800 B.C., the Late
Paleo-Eskimo people known as the Dorset culture emerged. The
Dorset people had a more marine lifestyle, involving whaling and
seal hunting. Their culture is divided into three phases,
altogether lasting about 2,100 years.

"One may almost say kind of jokingly or informally that the
Dorsets were the hobbits of the Eastern Arctic, a very strange
and very conservative people that we are just now getting to know
a little bit," said study co-author William Fitzhugh, an
anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum
of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The Dorset culture ended sometime between 1150 and 1350 A.D.,
getting rapidly replaced after the sudden appearance of
Neo-Eskimo whale-hunters known as the Thule culture. These
newcomers from the
Bering Strait region brought new technology from Asia,
including complex weapons such as sinew-backed bows and more
effective means of transportation such as dog sleds. The Thule
"pioneered the hunting of large whales for the first time ever
in, I guess, maybe anywhere in the world," Fitzhugh said.

Modern Inuit cultures emerged from the Thule during the decline
of whaling near the end of the period known as the Little Ice
Age, which lasted from the 16th to 19th century. This ultimately
led the Inuit to adopt the hunting of walruses at the edges of
ice packs and the hunting of seals at their breathing holes.

Previous studies hinted that some modern Native Americans, such
as the Athabascans in northwestern North America, might be
descended from the Paleo-Eskimos. However, these findings now
quash that idea. "The results of this paper have a bearing not
just on the peopling of the Arctic, but also the peopling of the
Americas," lead study author Maanasa Raghavan, a molecular
biologist at the University of Copenhagen's National Museum of
Natural History in Denmark, told Live Science.

The new findings suggest the Paleo-Eskimos apparently survived in
near-isolation for more than 4,000 years. The arrival of
Paleo-Eskimos into the Americas was its own independent migration
event, with Paleo-Eskimos genetically distinct from both the
Neo-Eskimos and
modern Native Americans.

"I was actually surprised that we don't find any evidence of
mixture between Native Americans and Paleo-Eskimos,"

said study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist
also at the University of Copenhagen's National Museum of Natural
History. "In other studies, when we see people meeting each
other, they might be fighting each other, but normally they
actually also
have sex with each other, but that doesn't seem to really
have been the case here. They must have been coexisting for
thousands of years, so at least from a genetic point of view, the
lack of mixture between those two groups was a bit surprising."

The reason the Paleo-Eskimos may not have mixed with the
Neo-Eskimos or the ancestors of modern Native Americans was
"because they had such an entirely different mindset," Fitzhugh
said. "Their religions were completely different, their resources
and their technologies were different. When you have people who
are so close to nature as the Paleo-Eskimos had to be to survive,
they had to be extremely careful about maintaining good
relationships with the animals, and that meant not polluting the
relationship by introducing new ideas, new rituals, new materials
and so forth."

The researchers did find evidence of gene flow between
Paleo-Eskimos and Neo-Eskimos. However, this likely occurred
before the groups migrated to the New World, back in Siberia,
among the common ancestors of both lineages. The new
evidence suggests that in the American Arctic, the two groups
largely stayed separate.

In addition, while differences in the artifacts and architecture
of the Pre-Dorset and Dorset had led previous studies to suggest
they had different ancestral populations, these new findings
suggest the Early and Late Paleo-Eskimos did share a common
ancestral group. "The pre-Dorset people, the Dorset ancestors,
seemed to have morphed into Dorset culture," Fitzhugh told Live
Science.

One mystery these findings help solve is the origin of the
Sadlermiut people, who survived until the beginning of the 20th
century in the region near Canada's Hudson Bay, until the last of
them perished from a disease introduced by whalers. The
Sadlermiut avoided interaction with everyone outside their own
society, and according to their Inuit neighbors, the Sadlermiut
spoke a strange dialect, were bad at skills the Inuit considered
vital, such as
constructing igloos and tending oil lamps, were unclean, and
did not observe standard Inuit taboos, all of which suggested
that the Sadlermiut were descended from Paleo-Eskimos instead of
Neo-Eskimos.

However, these new findings revealed the Sadlermiut showed
evidence of only Inuit ancestry. Their cultural differences from
other Inuit may have been the result of their isolation.

It remains a mystery why the Dorset people ultimately died off.
Previous studies suggested the Dorset were absorbed by the
expanding Thule population — and the Thule did adopt Dorset
harpoon types, soapstone lamps and pots, and snow houses.
However, these new findings do not find evidence of interbreeding
between the groups.

One possibility is that the rise of the Thule represented "an
example of prehistoric genocide," Fitzhugh said. "The lack of
significant genetic mixing might make it appear so." However,
Thule legends of the Dorset "tell only of friendly relations with
a race of gentle giants," Fitzhugh added.

Another possibility is that diseases introduced by Vikings or the
Thule may have triggered the collapse of the Dorset, Fitzhugh
said. However, "if it's disease, then you'd expect to find dead
bodies of Dorset people in their houses, and that's never been
found," Fitzhugh said. [ Fierce
Fighters: 7 Secrets of Viking Seamen ]

To help solve this and other remaining mysteries about the
peopling of the New World Arctic, the researchers plan to look at
more ancient human remains in both the Americas and Asia. The
scientists detailed their findings in the Aug. 29 issue of the
journal Science.